Piaget's Stage Theory of Cognitive Development

1. Today’s session

2. Piaget’s stage theory • Piaget said that children’s cognitive development unfolds in stages. • Where have we encountered stage theories before? • What does a stage theory imply about development?

3. Gradualist vs. Stage theories Gradual change over time Abrupt change Relative stability Psychological attribute How might the line representing a stage theory be different? Time

4. Stage Theories • Development is discontinuous • Each stage is qualitatively distinct • The sequence is universal and invariant • These statements are true of all stage theories of development. What might they mean as applied to cognitive development?

5. Piaget’s stage theory • Children’s ability to understand, think about and solve problems in the world develops in a stop-start manner. • At each stage of development, the child’s thinking is qualitatively different from the other stages. • All children go through the same stages in the same order (but not all at the same rate)

6. Piaget’s Stage Theory of Cognitive Development

7. Homework pt. 1 • Invent a mnemonic to help you remember the names and order of Piaget’s stages.

8. Sensorimotor stage • In the first stage, the child ‘thinks’ by sensing (‘sensori-’) and by performing actions on (‘-motor’) the world around it. • It does not think by manipulating mental representations, like an adult does.

9. General Symbolic Function • During the sensorimotor stage a range of cognitive abilities develop. These include: • Object permanence • Self-recognition • Deferred imitation • Representational play • They relate to the emergence of the general symbolic function, which is the capacity to represent the world mentally This one is named in the spec so you need to know lots about it.

10. Object permanence • Infants do not realise that objects exist independently of them • ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ • Object permanence is the understanding that objects continue to exist when the child cannot see them

11. How could we investigate whether a child has object permanence?

12. Piaget (1963) – search tasks

13. Object permanence

14. Homework pt. 2 • Is Piaget’s search task a valid test of whether a child has developed object permanence? • Does a child’s failure to search mean that it has no idea that the object still exists? • Might this task be measuring something else instead? • Two students will be presenting their views to the class at the start of next lesson, so be prepared.

15. Review • Pair up. Decide who will be infant and who will be investigator. • Investigator must test infant’s object permanence using the two hiding place method. • Infant must decide which stage of development she is at and respond accordingly. • Investigator must identify child’s likely age and explain why.